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delight and peace are his! Palissy the potter, clad in rags, starving, burning his last chair as fuel for his experiments, his haggard wife and children almost fancying him insane, was by no means the unhappiest of men. Inspired by a splendid hope, already clutching the prize, he wist not of hunger or of sneers; thrills of rare bliss visited his breast, and bankers and cardinals might well have envied him. When we think of the astronomer in his secluded tower, in the gloom, hour by hour turning his glass on the unbreathing heaven, peering into the nebulous oceans, or following the solemn wanderers; when we notice the lamp of some poor student, burning in his window, his shadow falling on the tattered curtain where he sits with book and pen, night after night, "outwatching the Bear and Thrice-great Hermes," we may fancy that he leads a tedious and depressing life. Ah, The august fellowship of eternal laws, the thought of God, the spirits of the great dead, kindling ideas and hopes, the lineaments of supersensual beauty, glorious plans of human improvement, - dispel his weariness, cheer every drooping faculty, illumine the bleak chamber, and make it populous with presences of grandeur and joy. The solitude is unreal, for he is absorbingly busy. He is alone, but not lonely.

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When with a great company one listens to fascinating music, gradually the spell begins to work; little by little the soft wild melody penetrates the affections, the subtle harmony steals into the inmost cells of the brain, winds in honeyed coils around every thought, until consciousness is saturated with the charm. We forget all. Distraction ceases, variety is gone. Spectators, chandeliers, theatre, disappear. The world recedes and vanishes. The soul is ravished away, captive to a strain, lost in bewilderment of bliss, its entire being concentrated in a listening act; and we are able to believe the old legend of the saint who, caught up into paradise by overhearing the song of the Blest, on awakening from his entrancement found that a thousand years had passed while he was hearkening. Such is the solitude of absorption, when it touches its climax. He is wise who

endeavors to know something of its elevation and blessedness by giving his soul to those supernal realities which are worthy to take his absolute allegiance, and swallow him up. Though such an one lives in solitude, the solitude itself is inexpressibly sociable.

The Solitude of Selfishness.

TURNING to still another province of the subject, we find a less congenial topic awaiting us. There is a repulsive species of loneliness very different in its origin and nature from the forms thus far portrayed. It may be designated the solitude of meanness or guilt. Of all the unfellowshipping styles of life this is the bleakest and the most unamiable. In fact, the other moods of segregate experience, however sad or painful they may be, are not ignoble nor pernicious. But the persons who here come under notice, with their ominous habits of aloofness, are marked by gloomy or narrow and despicable qualities which cause them to be disliked and shunned. To enjoy company we must be able to trust each other, frankly unbosom ourselves, think similar thoughts, feel accordant emotions, blend hearts in unreserved surrender to common influences. The action and reaction of souls in the same manner and on the same objects, is the fruition of friendship, the experience of harmonized states of consciousness sympathetically awakened and sympathetically changing. But this is comparatively the prerogative of the virtuous, the tender, the disinterested. In proportion as any one is morose and hateful his cold or jealous vileness cuts him off from the happiness of genuine fellowship. Wherever he may be he is alone. To be destitute of sympathy is the very solitude of solitude, no matter what the circumstances, whether from the window of a diligence you look with aching heart on a village merry-making, or pause, risen above the clouds, a solitary wanderer, amid the glacial sea, gazing in horror on its dumb desolation. And if absence of sympathy be the essence of loneliness, who

so lonely as the cold earthlings who form the various embodiments of selfishness, who take no interest in others except to make use of them, giving no impulsive love, asking none. The heartless, it is certain, cannot perform the functions nor enjoy the satisfactions of heart. They may not know the difference themselves, their very impoverishment securing them immunity from the pangs of baffled affection, so that they do not suffer from conscious and painful isolation. Only the loving pine for love. The most unsympathetic, obviously, will care least for society. But the repulsive solitude in which the incapacity of their mutilated natures imprisons them, preserves one of its aspects of penalty in undiminished reality. If they are not aware of the negative, to languish under its deprivations, neither can they possess the positive, to thrill with its bestowments. Such an one dwells unconsciously chained in a movable prison which he carries around him wherever he goes, which hopelessly shuts the sweetest boons of existence from access to his soul; and though that prison is invisible to him, every other eye discerns it. Thus the miser, whose sordid love of money receives all other feelings into its sea-like passion, who withdraws every fibre of his soul from friend and foe, from truth and beauty, to cling exclusively around his yellow heaps, isolated within his squalid show of rags and penury, when he retires to gloat secretly over his hoards, does not himself feel lonely; but to those who regard him he seems profoundly so. They see him, the abject outcast, as an unclean waif tossed into the sewer of society from the gutter of civilization. They give him a glance of contemptuous pity in passing, somewhat as they would fling a bone to a starving dog. Is not such a life a horrible loneliness? Outwardly viewed, it is a fearful solitude; although inwardly it may swarm with an obscene activity of greed and complacency.

There is, then, an experience carried on within itself, quite aloof from the joyous companionship of life, not for lack of time and space for social interchange, but from want of the personal material and conditions. This is the solitude of a heartless or wicked breast.

A man

locked up in a shrivelled and frigid self-hood, with no living currents of faith and love between him and his fellow-creatures, is as much alone amidst a Parisian holiday, surrounded by a bedecked and huzzaing world of humanity, as the traveller who loses his way, benighted in the centre of a Polish forest, and, in the drifted snow, leans against a tree, starving and freezing, while the distant yell of wolves is borne to his ears.

A Greek philosopher, referring to two opposite kinds of loneliness, experienced from antithetical causes, said that he who loved solitude must be either a god or a beast. He only stated the truth a little extravagantly. Man is made for society and brotherhood. He who is content to dwell alone, then, without society or brotherhood, is on a plane of endowment and desire either superior or inferior to that of common humanity, approximates the level either of a divinity or of a brute. In other words, solitude may be approached by ascent or by descent. There is the separation of the throne, and there is the separation of the sty. Man may soar into experiences too exalted and complex for easy communication with comrades of the earth, too sublime and holy to be vulgarized in plebeian speech, the solitude of a god. Man may sink into experiences too poor and base to bear articulation, too secret and selfish to be capable of sympathy, the solitude of a beast. Thus one may be alone because he is above, or because he is beneath, the conditions of satisfactory companionship with his neighbors. While these two are alike in being isolated, the distinction between them traverses the entire distance from the august to the despicable. The sentiment of the lonely which invests the self-seeker in his plot differs from that which surrounds the poet in his dream as the solitude of the buzzard, picking his prey in the glen, differs from the solitude of the sun, burning in the zenith.

The legitimate effect of sin, of everything that serves private interest to the injury of the universal interest, is to sunder and segregate. Evil bristles with negative polarity, and would disintegrate the society in which it prevails. On the other hand, the power of virtue leads

its subjects to commune, clasp, coalesce. The fox, the hawk, the leopard, from their selfish dispositions, are solitary; they shun a company that they may the better pounce on their prey, and glut their appetite. But the bees live in swarms, the friendly swallows fly in flocks and build their nests in contiguity. Brave impulses and magnanimous sentiments, every moral or religious affection, all qualities loyally allied to principles that subordinate individual whims to the general good, are attractive, have a public regard, yearn spontaneously outward to love and be loved, to bless and be blessed. They draw men into groups, set the nerves of relationship vibrating, fill the channels of mutual life with invitation and energy. This is the instinctive tendency of all rich and gentle hearts, unless, as sometimes unhappily occurs, tragic rebuffs, failures and sufferings teach them to act otherwise in self-defence. But ignoble passions, cruel indulgence, all the suspicious and hateful characteristics of selfishness, which would gratify the lawless craving of the individual at the expense of the solemn and permanent weal of the whole, naturally creep into secrecy, and, repulsively electrized with fear and malignity, walk apart there.

An intense feeling of solitude is produced in a man of dark designs when his confederates turn against him and desert him. In the revulsion from busy associates and elated hopes to isolation, overthrow and despair, he must feel a fearful loneliness. Wallenstein, betrayed by Gallas, Piccolomini, Altringer, and nearly all the rest in whom he had confided, standing solitary, overwhelmed, yet upright, amidst the ruins of his guilty projects, furnishes an impressive instance. The superstitious dreams with which he had linked his destiny to the stars, nursing his vast and sombre ambition with astrological prognostics, only served then to make his solitude more gigantic.

The fittest emblem of the solitude of a completely selfish man moving about in society, is the loneliness of an iceberg drifting amidst the crowds of waves, now feebly glimmering with moonbeams, now shattering the tempest on its breast, finally, honeycombed with rotten

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